Rants, Tips, and Junk for Building Design Technology

Plan Region Oddities

We had a hiccup with our Plan Regions today that I thought I would throw out here so others can enjoy our twenty minutes of panic and confusion.

For a little background so we’re all on the same page… let’s say our cut plane is about 4′-6″ on a typical floor plan. Actually, let’s say it’s precisely 4′-6″. That gets us through most doors and windows and walls. Things that we like to slice through (through which we like to slice).

But, alas, this one little roof shed has a louver that’s up around 8′-0″. It would be absolutley silly to make another plan simply to show this louver. What is one to do?

Luckily, Revit has a solution for us. Looking under VIEW you will see the PLAN REGION tool. This is a pretty nifty thing. A plan region allows you to define an area on the plan that follows different view range settings. Which will allow us to move the cut plane around the lovers to 8′-2″.

Clicking PLAN REGION will take you into the ubiquitous sketch mode where you will sketch out the perimeter of your new plan region. While still in sketch mode, you can click the Plan Region Properties button and in there you’ll see the View Range button. Click that, and you get the same view range settings that you would see on any view. Tweak them to what you need, click OK, finish your sketch and voila! that small sketched area now has a different view range. End background.

The oddity came in when a user had opened a view with a Plan Region and all of the walls in that region were missing! First reaction, of course, was that someone had deleted the walls. Who shall we kill?! After some quick investigation, turns out the walls were there. So what was up with them not showing through the Plan Region?

To test, all we did was create a new Plan Region with the same view range. Yup. It all showed up. Walls, tags, everything. But that original Plan Region was mad.

To fix it? Selected the region and clicked its EDIT button. Got back into sketch mode. Made no changes, and simply finished the sketch again.

Poof. Everything showed back up. It just needed a kick in the pants, apparently.

We love our Plan Regions. I just hope they start behaving better. Panic attacks are not a good thing when you’re one week to go on a project.